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IMO it's certainly possible to make ads unblockable. Right now they just aren't trying very hard. It's all about the footprints. This article claims that law

IMO it's certainly possible to make ads unblockable. Right now they just aren't trying very hard. It's all about the footprints. This article claims that laws requiring ads to be marked as such would preclude them from removing these footprints, but that isn't necessarily true. For example, Facebook could have two images of identical size, one that says the word "sponsored" and one that is blank, stored on their servers. Every post - sponsored or not - could reference the image like "/image.png?postid=123" and the server would decide based on the post ID which image to actually serve. Unless adblockers could implement machine vision, they wouldn't be able to distinguish this. Facebook could also go the hostile route - when they detect an ad blocker, just display a blank overlay saying that you can't use Facebook with an ad blocker enabled. Ads are here to stay.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ArchReaper 10y ago
I believe this would violate ease-of-access rules - screen readers would have to be able to tell a user, so if an image is used, the alt/title tag would be set to 'sponsored'.
- downandout 10y ago
  I suppose, but that's not a legal issue, that's a usability issue. There's no law that says I have to use alt/title tags.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    The ADA might want to disagree with you: "The Department is currently developing regulations specifically addressing the accessibility of goods and services offered via the web by entities covered by the ADA. The fact that the regulatory process is not yet complete in no way indicates that web services are not already covered by title III." — Statement of Interest of the United States Department of Justice in NAD v. Netflix (page 10)
    - downandout 10y ago
      Title tags are not appropriate for every image, and no judge is going to wade into the murky waters of deciding which images need them or not.
      - falcolas 10y ago
        If the title tag which denotes that it's sponsored content, as required by another government agency, you can easily assume that yes, a judge will care.
    - downandout 10y ago
      > by entities covered by the ADA Is Facebook covered by the ADA? I can't imagine that they are, as it is not an essential service. According to [1]: "The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and, if the government entities receive federal funding, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 generally require that state and local governments provide qualified individuals with disabilities equal access to their programs, services, or activities unless doing so would fundamentally alter the nature of their programs, services, or activities or would impose an undue burden". But that has nothing to do with private organizations that are not receiving federal funding or providing access to government funded services. [1] https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm
      - falcolas 10y ago
        You may notice that the quote in my original post is from the DoJ to Netflix. If Netflix is subject, why wouldn't Facebook be? The ADA also applies to privately owned stores as well, so there is certainly precedent. Ever wonder why your office building has a certain number of handicapped parking spots in its parking lot? The ADA is why.
        downandout 10y ago
        What you're referring to is not a court ruling, but rather an opinion letter penned by the DOJ in a case to which it was not even a party. It holds no legal weight.
  - alexbecker 10y ago
    IANAL, but I was under the impression that the Americans with Disabilities Act can be applied to some websites to impose just such a requirement.
    - downandout 10y ago
      Yes. Those would be government websites providing essential services. Not privately owned and operated websites.
fapjacks 10y ago
No, ads are not here to stay. The arms race will escalate. Facebook will lose. And so will every other entity that thinks they'll be able to force ads down our throats.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  This. There are tons of talented engineers who will put some serious time into defeating any insidious crap that advertisers try to shove on us. If they start doing things like hosting ads on the same image domain as normal content with indistinguishable URL patterns, people will implement OpenCV to see if an image has any text, and block it if so (trivial example). It might be difficult enough that the mainstream ad blockers will miss it and the arms race will temporarily be "won" by Facebook et al, but the tech savvy will never have to look at ads. Real life is one exception, since it's hard to stop cities from allowing the construction of billboards. People could start ripping them down, breaking the electronic ones, tagging them, hacking them and replacing the images with offensive ones, etc to send a message that we don't want this trash polluting our vision, but most people aren't that annoyed by them yet.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Messing with billboards can get you in legal trouble, which is probably one big reason it hasn't happened yet, unlike ad-blocking on the web which is perfectly legal and doable. However, now that we have super-cheap small "drone"/RC aircraft, it would probably be fairly simple to rig one up with a can of spray paint and use that to deface billboards without being easily nabbed.... (Anyone who wants to use my idea is welcome to it!)
zzzcpan 10y ago
> Unless adblockers could implement machine vision, they wouldn't be able to distinguish this. Why not? Surely it would be possible to identify the content itself, instead of ads and hide everything else, including ads and other noise. Think how we distinguish spam e-mails from real e-mails based on their content.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>acebook could also go the hostile route - when they detect an ad blocker, just display a blank overlay saying that you can't use Facebook with an ad blocker enabled. They could, but ad blockers could respond by downloading the ads and simply not displaying them. They probably don't do this right now because it's wasteful (one of the reasons to block ads is to save your bandwidth and increase your loading time by not wasting time downloading the ads), but it can certainly be a last resort, especially if it's only certain sites that do it as the ad-blockers can resort to this behavior only for those sites. The only way I see for them to prevent ad-blocking altogether is to mark every image as an ad, even if it isn't one. I'm not sure how legal that would be. It wouldn't completely prevent ad-blocking, but it'd make it somewhat pointless to view an image-oriented site.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ArchReaper 10y ago

I believe this would violate ease-of-access rules - screen readers would have to be able to tell a user, so if an image is used, the alt/title tag would be set to 'sponsored'.

downandout 10y ago
I suppose, but that's not a legal issue, that's a usability issue. There's no law that says I have to use alt/title tags.
- falcolas 10y ago
  The ADA might want to disagree with you: "The Department is currently developing regulations specifically addressing the accessibility of goods and services offered via the web by entities covered by the ADA. The fact that the regulatory process is not yet complete in no way indicates that web services are not already covered by title III." — Statement of Interest of the United States Department of Justice in NAD v. Netflix (page 10)
  - downandout 10y ago
    Title tags are not appropriate for every image, and no judge is going to wade into the murky waters of deciding which images need them or not.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      If the title tag which denotes that it's sponsored content, as required by another government agency, you can easily assume that yes, a judge will care.
  - downandout 10y ago
    > by entities covered by the ADA Is Facebook covered by the ADA? I can't imagine that they are, as it is not an essential service. According to [1]: "The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and, if the government entities receive federal funding, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 generally require that state and local governments provide qualified individuals with disabilities equal access to their programs, services, or activities unless doing so would fundamentally alter the nature of their programs, services, or activities or would impose an undue burden". But that has nothing to do with private organizations that are not receiving federal funding or providing access to government funded services. [1] https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm
    - falcolas 10y ago
      You may notice that the quote in my original post is from the DoJ to Netflix. If Netflix is subject, why wouldn't Facebook be? The ADA also applies to privately owned stores as well, so there is certainly precedent. Ever wonder why your office building has a certain number of handicapped parking spots in its parking lot? The ADA is why.
      - downandout 10y ago
        What you're referring to is not a court ruling, but rather an opinion letter penned by the DOJ in a case to which it was not even a party. It holds no legal weight.
- alexbecker 10y ago
  IANAL, but I was under the impression that the Americans with Disabilities Act can be applied to some websites to impose just such a requirement.
  - downandout 10y ago
    Yes. Those would be government websites providing essential services. Not privately owned and operated websites.

fapjacks 10y ago

No, ads are not here to stay. The arms race will escalate. Facebook will lose. And so will every other entity that thinks they'll be able to force ads down our throats.

seanp2k2 10y ago
This. There are tons of talented engineers who will put some serious time into defeating any insidious crap that advertisers try to shove on us. If they start doing things like hosting ads on the same image domain as normal content with indistinguishable URL patterns, people will implement OpenCV to see if an image has any text, and block it if so (trivial example). It might be difficult enough that the mainstream ad blockers will miss it and the arms race will temporarily be "won" by Facebook et al, but the tech savvy will never have to look at ads. Real life is one exception, since it's hard to stop cities from allowing the construction of billboards. People could start ripping them down, breaking the electronic ones, tagging them, hacking them and replacing the images with offensive ones, etc to send a message that we don't want this trash polluting our vision, but most people aren't that annoyed by them yet.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Messing with billboards can get you in legal trouble, which is probably one big reason it hasn't happened yet, unlike ad-blocking on the web which is perfectly legal and doable. However, now that we have super-cheap small "drone"/RC aircraft, it would probably be fairly simple to rig one up with a can of spray paint and use that to deface billboards without being easily nabbed.... (Anyone who wants to use my idea is welcome to it!)

zzzcpan 10y ago

> Unless adblockers could implement machine vision, they wouldn't be able to distinguish this. Why not? Surely it would be possible to identify the content itself, instead of ads and hide everything else, including ads and other noise. Think how we distinguish spam e-mails from real e-mails based on their content.

Grishnakh 10y ago

>acebook could also go the hostile route - when they detect an ad blocker, just display a blank overlay saying that you can't use Facebook with an ad blocker enabled. They could, but ad blockers could respond by downloading the ads and simply not displaying them. They probably don't do this right now because it's wasteful (one of the reasons to block ads is to save your bandwidth and increase your loading time by not wasting time downloading the ads), but it can certainly be a last resort, especially if it's only certain sites that do it as the ad-blockers can resort to this behavior only for those sites. The only way I see for them to prevent ad-blocking altogether is to mark every image as an ad, even if it isn't one. I'm not sure how legal that would be. It wouldn't completely prevent ad-blocking, but it'd make it somewhat pointless to view an image-oriented site.